Finding Authenticity
6-week poetry writing series
Reflect on how you show up in the world when engaged in movement, stillness, work, relationship, and play. Then define your authenticity… with poetry.
View a summary of the last workshop for a sense of what to expect.
New to poetry? You’re welcome here. No prior experience with poetry writing is necessary to participate.
Register For Class
NEXT SERIES: Thursdays, January 25th – March 7th, 2024
Time: 6-8pm PST
Cost: $350 CAD + GST
Where: IN-PERSON, location TBA
Number of participants: 6
Workshop Schedule
Trying to find your authenticity (nail it down, name it, hold onto it forever) is completely impractical, and to be honest I think the word ‘authenticity’ is overused. This is exactly why I designed this series. Here’s the class format and schedule:
We begin each session with a spacious conversation that will highlight the similarities in our experience, and the differences. Together, we’ll find the threads that capture our attention, and the questions that leave us wondering and excited to explore.
Our curiosity now enlivened, you’ll move into a private writing practice that includes mindfulness, guided freewriting, and silence to write a poem that gives voice to your experience in a creative way. Think of the poetry you write each week as a time capsule — capturing your experience now, to be returned to later whenever it’s needed.
We end with an opportunity to share what we’ve written with the group, and to witness the creative reflections of others. Sharing is never mandatory.
Week 1: Authenticity and your body
“Movement is the personality made visible…“
– from ‘Physical Movement and Personality’ (essay) by Mary Starks Whitehouse
What does the way that you move — and resist moving — reveal about who you are? What stories does your body tell through the way that it breathes, the way that it dances? Reflect on your experience and then… write a poem.
Week 2: Authenticity in stillness and rest
“Beneath her own stillness was urgency, and beneath that, an even deeper stillness.”
– from ‘Sewer Linda’ by Josephine Sloyan (a short story published in Room Magazine, Issue 42.2)
What rises to the surface when it’s time to be still, or when it’s time to rest? Are you able to be with yourself without feeling the need to run away? And when you do finally allow yourself sit within the contents of stillness, what do you discover about who you are? Reflect on your experience and then… write a poem.
Week 3: Authenticity in relationship
“You lean into the table and tell her, adoringly, ‘I can’t believe you exist.‘”
– from ‘Too Much and Not the Mood’ by Durga Chew-Bose
How do you stay true to yourself in relationship, while also respecting the individuality and internal world of another? How do you love and/or care for those around you? Reflect on your experience of a romantic relationship, friendship, parent-child relationship (etc), and then… write a poem.
Week 4: Authenticity at work
“As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view…”
– from ‘A Writer’s Diary’ by Virginia Woolf
In what ways does your work bring out the best in you, by highlighting your strengths, allowing you to blossom? Or… in what ways does it bring out the worst: bringing to the surface your fears and insecurities, feelings of being a fraud? Reflect on your experience, and then… write a poem.
Week 5: Authenticity in joy and creativity
“… that was the moment the stone in his throat became dislodged… Words gathered in his mouth then, words he hadn’t known were part of his being. They leapt from his lips: his gratitude, his ardor, his most private longings…”
– from ‘The Stone Diaries’ by Carol Shields
When carried away by an activity that brings you great joy, what happens to your sense of Self? Reflect on your experience, and then… write a poem.
Week 6: Your Authentic Self
“Now I become myself / It’s taken time, many years and places / I have been dissolved and shaken / worn other people’s faces.”
-May Sarton, ‘Now I Become Myself’ (poem)
Reflect on the conversations we’ve had, and the poetry you’ve written over the last 5 weeks. Consider anew your relationship to authenticity, and then… write a poem that brings it all together.
All classes are facilitated by Christine Bissonnette.
Read testimonials here.